this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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El Chisme
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I read too much Orwell as a teenager. His personal politics outside of fighting in Spain are fairly shit. Most of Orwell is incredibly boring and simplistic, but I think there are a few deeper parts of it are glossed over especially by libs who think 1984 is a book about communism instead of a book about power.
For example everyone knows the quote:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever"
Which everyone is like "omg gommunism" to.
This appears in a passage in the book is where O'Brien is explaining the operation of power politics as it relates to parties to Winston as he's torturing him.
This is a Blue No Matter Who society. This is a society pure party politics, a society of us and them. Ironically many liberals cannot see the "us" in the "them" of the book. Liberals on their loss literally went online to reclaim their power by gloating about genocide, by gloating about the coming abuse of minorities, and by gloating about the coming economic instability. They were denied the thrill of victory, the thrill of stomping their enemies, so they must recuperate that feeling of power in another way. This is why every few months they start posting about Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, Muslims in Deerborn, Gaza Activists, or for those who are older Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Ted Kennedy, or the eternal of evil non-voters.
The Democrats like O'Brien love creating fake enemies to rile up their base. They use the threat of their "enemies" to their "base" in the same way that in 1984 there's always a Goldberg terror cell around every corner.
Ironically the whole "cruelty for cruelty's sake" is a hilarious denial of the core of the whole book which states "cruelty is the expression of political power". Which they themselves do politically (e.g. Blue team owns the leader board in cleansing brown people from the core and in the periphery) and socially when they're in and out of power. Yet they still love citing it.
But of course Orwell was wrong about the form, there's no 20 Minutes of Hate that's conveniently isolated and ignored if like Winston you find it icky. It's a Unending Hate that's dispensed through a voluntary capitalist media system that hooks you into the feeling. Infinite Scroll is 20 Minutes of Hate. 24 Hour News cycles are 20 Minutes of Hate. Hollywood Movies and Sports Games sponsored by the Department of Defense are 20 Minutes of Hate. They serve the same social purpose. They just have a different and less baby brained form, so the baby brains who love this book cannot make the connections.
We live in a power society. Our O'Briens are capitalists. To the O'Brien and Elon Musks of the world there is no difference to torturing you or forcing you to listen to shitty internet jokes from 2009, to them it's an expression of power that demands reverence. Musk knows he's not funny. He knows he constantly eats shit. He does his little shows anyway because he knows people are forced to pay attention to him. They must suffer him because of his station. The entire capitalist system is built that way. You must suffer them, that is the social relation devoid of economics.
There are some ideas that Orwell got right. There's not many of them, and they're just constantly ignored and misapplied.
I do think Orwell understood capitalism fairly well, the problem was, he assumed that all systems would behave exactly the same way as capitalism, or even "worse" somehow. As always with anti-communists, his work was entirely projection.
Honestly it's just because we're too close to the history. It's Dante's Inferno but for children where a large portion of the characters are just personal grievances the author has with their political contemporaries. It's not even a good point, it's just a hate boner for Stalin which essentially buys into the cult of personality anyway.